By Carlos Moncho
Experience is everything in hotels today. And a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system designed for hospitality has the power to make hotels stand out from the crowd.
Positive guest interactions are the starting point for long-term loyalty and stand-out experiences. Good experiences lead to great reviews, and a progressive cycle of bookings and enthusiasm for your brand. The right hospitality CRM serves as the nerve center of your hotel, enabling you to streamline operations, cultivate long-term guest relationships, and centrally manage guest interactions throughout the hotel, including at dining, spa and leisure outlets.
The right CRM helps hotels deliver that craved-for personalized experience, meeting the needs of each guest on their individual journey. Research by McKinsey highlights how a hotel CRM can track the preferences of repeat customers and distribute the information to staff to help them deliver thoughtful and exceptional customer service.
Whether it’s reserving a favorite table or having the right pillows ready in the room – this is the kind of experience guests want more of. McKinsey also found that personalized service is valued 2.5 times more by Gen Z than by Baby Boomers. Clearly, personalization will only become more important over time.
So how does a hotel-specific CRM help hoteliers elevate operations and the service they deliver?
1. Driving revenue in a unique but fragmented industry
Hospitality is a distinct and unique industry; guests go on a journey from pre-arrival to post-checkout, and hotels are made up of complex components including food and beverage (F&B), spa and wellness, and activities and experiences. These business units have historically operated separately, with their own P&L and management systems, sometimes catering to different sets of guests.
The one-of-a-kind set-up of hotel operations means the hospitality technology space is very fragmented. Many hotels have to connect to literally hundreds of platforms just to be able to manage all elements of the business. A generic CRM simply cannot capture the breadth of information from multiple sources and customer interactions, while embedding a digital guest experience.
Not only does a hospitality-focused CRM help manage guest profiles from a variety of business units, it enables hotels to drive ancillary revenue throughout the digital guest journey and from returning guests. Whether it’s syncing with property management systems (PMS), point-of-sale systems (POS), booking engines (BE), central reservation systems (CRS), or revenue management systems (RMS), to name a few, these integrated solutions create a cohesive operational ecosystem.
2. Supporting omnichannel touchpoints
Hospitality CRMs capture and analyze a wealth of guest data, including preferences, behaviors, and interactions across various touchpoints. Harnessing centralized data results in highly detailed guest profiles that can feed into both time-saving automation and segmentation. This level of granularity allows exceptional personalization and more effective marketing campaigns too.
By using highly segmented data from the CRM and other integrated sources, hotels can deliver more targeted campaigns across multiple channels, including social media, Google AdWords and messaging platforms. The potential impact of this is significant, particularly when creating special offers that resonate with each segment’s unique preferences and interests.
3. Fast implementation
Hotel-specific CRMs come with out-of-the-box hospitality-focused tools which enable hotels to get started immediately. This includes common audience segments, email templates, and campaign workflows on multiple different channels.
A hotel-specific CRM can drive quicker results, compared to spending substantial time and resources customizing a generic CRM to try to make it fit your needs. A specialist CRM reduces implementation costs and generates ROI sooner. Over time, hotels can improve even more by refining the way they use the data and reports in a CRM.
Conclusion
When we consider what hotels are most concerned about – it’s staying competitive. And strategizing for the future is key to this. Hotel-specific CRMs help by offering deep insights into guest behaviors, market trends, and revenue opportunities. Analyzing this data provides actionable intelligence for strategic decision making.
Using this data for day-to-day operations can also drive sustainable growth. For example, recommending ancillary services to increase revenue per guest. As hotel-specific CRMs can analyze guests’ past stays, they enable hotels to create bespoke loyalty incentives for their customers. Recognizing loyal customers at every touchpoint is key for members of loyalty schemes, according to research by Global Hotel Alliance and Skift. This elevates overall customer satisfaction and lifetime value.
Ultimately, hotel CRMs understand the intricacies of the hospitality industry to make a tangible impact on guest experience, loyalty and the long-term strategic success of hotels.
